Polish startup makes warehouse robotics breakthrough

The field of automation and robotics has made countless breakthroughs in recent years, but one task that, though simple for human workers, has long been elusive to robots - picking items up from out of a box.

While sounding uncomplicated on the surface, the ability to pick up objects of varying sizes and shapes - as opposed to uniform ones - is still a relatively new skill for robots. It involves a level of hand-eye coordination that is, at present, difficult to "teach" a machine. 

“In almost every warehouse that you go to you will see a station with people whose task is to take an item from a box, potentially scan it, and then place it in another box or sorting system,” said Tristan d’Orgeval, co-founder and COO of Polish robot startup Nomagic. “That’s what we’re automating.”

The task of picking items out of a box, known as "bin picking" is one of the ever-dwindling number of repetitive warehouse jobs that are still carried out by humans.

That may soon change, however. Warsaw-based Nomagic says that its robots have already been deployed in several warehouses across Europe. 

The company, which was founded in 2017 by Tristan d'Orgeval, Kacper Nowicki, and Marek Cygan, has announced a total of $8.6-million (€7.8-million) in seed funding - one of the biggest seed rounds in Poland to date - co-led by Khosla Ventures and Hoxton Ventures, with existing investors DN Capital, Capnamic Ventures and Manta Ray.

Nomagic's Magicloader robots are already being utilised in warehouses owned and run by French e-commerce company Cdiscount. Each robot has a rubber sucker with which to pick up objects, such as iPhones from a cart of mixed up items. It would then scan them and place them into packaging. The robots have been working on packing objects since June 2019, sometimes for 24-hours a day.

“The breakthrough here are the deep neural networks and vision based on machine learning. This is what allows us to have a very high success rate for picking up these items and handling them,” said Nowicki.

According to d'Orgeval, the number of European warehouses with these kind of jobs is in the "high hundreds", and the number of workers that could be automated is in the hundreds of thousands.

Nomagic says that it now plans to focus on smoothing out the robot deployment process. At present, the bots are loaned out to clients on a "robot-as-a-service" business model. It will also look at making the technology work for more difficult items, such as clothes. It aims to deploy over 1,000 smart robots over the next five years.

“There’s a massive opportunity within the European market for warehouse robotics and automation, and Nomagic is well-positioned to capture some of that market share,” said Sven Strohband, managing director of Khosla Ventures.

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